David samuel peckinpah andrew sarris essay

* An excerpt from Sarris's "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962": ... [The] ultimate premise of the auteur theory is concerned with interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art. Interior meaning is extrapolated from the tension between a director's personality and his material.

In 2011 Sarris recommended five books of film criticism for The Browser -- by Bazin, James Agee, Robert Warshow, Manny Farber and David Thomson. Of Warshow he said: Warshow focused on the "immediate experience" of the viewer -- how a movie moved a man. He, in fact, preferred the term "movie" to the more highfalutin "film."

But in fact, its power comes from its inspiration of artists. In his forward to the 2001 collection "Directed by Allen Smithee ," edited by Jeremy Braddock and Stephen Hock, Sarris (in an avuncular and effusive mood) magnificently summed up his own legacy:

That didn't happen. And that mischaracterization does a disservice to Sarris, to Kael and to Siskel & Ebert, all of whom were taking their own distinctive and original approaches to movie reviewing and criticism.